A fitness tracker can help you stay active and track your progress throughout your fitness journey. It can remind you when you should take a break, tell you about your sleep, show you details about your workout, and even count your calories and steps per day.
But what happens when you start reacting to the notifications or worrying about getting your steps in? Your relationship with your fitness tracker is toxic if it feels more like an obligation than a helper. Thankfully, there are signs that your relationship with your fitness tracker is turning sour. Let’s take a look at some of the more common signs.
Obsessing Over The Numbers
A fitness tracker can provide a wealth of data, which can be useful when establishing goals and tracking progress. However, you may have a toxic relationship with your fitness tracker if you frequently check your daily steps, calories, or active minutes. You may also feel guilty or anxious if you don’t hit your daily goals, even if the rest of your day is productive.
You may use a fitness tracker to help you stay accountable and make progress toward your goals, but when you let your stats dictate success, it does the opposite and affects your health, self-worth, and happiness. It can also suck the joy from fitness, which is one of the top reasons people stop exercising. The reality is data is a tool to help you achieve goals and not an indicator of daily success.
The Fix: Learn to use your fitness tracker as a guide, not a rulebook. Your fitness tracker is to provide insights and trends, so you will want to look at the data over time. Don’t let it dictate your actions so you feel forced or anxious to achieve all your daily steps, calories, sleep, and active minutes goals.
Overexercising
Another sign of a toxic relationship with your fitness tracker is pushing yourself to exercise just to hit your daily or weekly goals. In itself, this doesn’t sound like a bad thing. After all, how will you stick to a routine if you don’t exercise?
It’s true that you can’t reap the benefits if you don’t consistently exercise. However, you know it’s an issue when you ignore signs that your body is run down or injured. If you’re exercising to receive praise from your fitness tracker, you’re doing it wrong.
The Fix: Ignore notifications and reminders to exercise, especially when your body feels tired. Overexercising can lead to injury, burnout, and chronic fatigue. What you do outside of exercising is just as important as proper form and appropriate effort while exercising. Rest and recovery allow your body time to repair and become stronger. Don’t let a streak or arbitrary goal become more important than your health and well-being.
It Doesn’t Count If It Isn’t Tracked
Do you feel like your day is ruined if you forget to log a workout, miss a total steps or calories burned goal, or the tracker doesn’t accurately record your activity? Do you do a second workout just so the data is reflected properly? If this is you, you’re in a toxic relationship with your fitness tracker.
Remember that a fitness tracker is simply a tool. While tracking yourself helps give a broad picture of your progress over time, you can still make progress without tracking anything. One missed goal or glitch doesn’t define your success. Achieving your fitness goals takes time, effort, and patience.
The Fix: If recording all your workouts is essential to you, consider using a fitness app that can sync your data from your fitness tracker so everything is in one place. That way, you can manually add your workouts, track what’s important, and let you choose to use or not use a fitness tracker for some or all of your workouts. What’s critical is to focus on your why and exercise to feel better, move more, and improve your quality of life.
Your Fitness Tracker Dictates Your Behavior
If you eat based on the calories burned instead of your hunger signals, skip activities you enjoy because they don’t count the same way, or stop what you’re doing to do an activity to clear a notification, you may be relying too much on your fitness tracker.
There is a bigger picture to this problem. You may be ignoring your body’s natural cues, such as hunger, fatigue, and pain, to hit an arbitrary daily goal. No matter what your fitness tracker says, nothing is more important than giving your body ample time to rest and recover. Trust your body’s signals over anything else. If you don’t properly recover from exercise, you’ll eventually injure yourself, forcing you to stop exercising and derailing your fitness goals.
The Fix: Create a fitness plan that works for you instead of relying on your fitness tracker. Turn off notifications, such as taking more steps, exercising, or moving, and stick to your plan. Treat any metrics for the current day as informational and stop relying on them as daily goals that must be met.
Cultivating A Healthy Relationship With Your Fitness Tracker
It’s easy to become reactive to your fitness tracker. Seeing what metrics you are producing from your effort is exciting and motivating. However, it’s best to recognize when you’re exercising for the sake of recording numbers instead of engaging in activities you enjoy. Let’s look at some tips to help prevent you from falling into a toxic relationship with your fitness tracker.
Track yourself, but don’t take the data seriously. Your data can be vital if you’re trying to hit certain milestones, such as a target heart rate or pace. However, most data should be treated as nice-to-know and only looked at over time to judge real progress. Celebrate small wins you can’t track, such as improvements in mood, energy, strength, and confidence.
Workouts still count even if you didn’t record them. You don’t need to have the numbers to prove it. In fact, you don’t need to record your workout to exercise. Embrace variety and include activities that make you happy, such as hiking, walking, or yoga. They all count towards improving your health and well-being regardless of what your fitness tracker tracked.
Always trust how you feel over what your fitness tracker says. Even if your fitness tracker doesn’t tell you to take a day off or that you’re at optimal readiness, you should if you’re experiencing persistent soreness or fatigue. Otherwise, you increase your risk of illness, injury, or burnout.
The Takeaway
A fitness tracker can be a valuable tool to help you achieve your fitness goals. They should enhance your life, not control it. If you notice signs that you’re exhibiting toxic behavior with your fitness tracker, it’s time to reassess how you use it. Your health and fitness journey is about progress over time, not what your fitness tracker says on any particular day. Listen to your body, enjoy the journey, and remember that you’re more than a collection of numbers.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your workouts, weight, mood, calories, and more. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect supported gadgets to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
